


Steal a Map, Keep a Promise

by sakuraba



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Comfort, Coping, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 07:06:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5530412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakuraba/pseuds/sakuraba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riku hurts his hand and finds new ways to hold up the sky. Sora thinks about forgiveness and lets Riku sleep on his floor. [Post-KHII/DDD; focuses on recovery and forgiveness.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steal a Map, Keep a Promise

 “I couldn't sleep.”

You hum, wrapping a makeshift T-shirt bandage around Riku's hand; sometime while you were gone, off traversing spacetime to find new ways to say hello, your mother installed a shingle. Well, a few shingles, actually, and they're nice, too, bright white and lined up like particularly polite razor-teeth. What's special about this one is that it was installed _badly_ – a loose and crooked canine, just dislodged enough to do some nasty damage to scrambling hands in the dark.

Riku never was a very good climber.

“Sorry about this,” he says for the umpteenth time. “Nothing's wrong, I just...” A cough and a restart. “It's late, sorry – are you going to bed soon?”

You don't push. Riku is sea-quartz, all life and no escape, and he'll tell you what you need to know in due time.

Instead, you smile into his shoulder and say, “I think I can manage to stay up a little longer.”

–

The thing about the island that Riku and Kairi don't seem to get is that it forgives.

They both visit it with you, thankfully, but you know you're not the only one who's been spending time away – both of them have spent their year hovering at the periphery, letting things blur in and out of focus until they finally let themselves back in. Kairi remembers you now, but the guilt still hangs around her sometimes, and there are days that Riku walks the beach like there's a noose around his neck.

The island forgives immediately. It's accepting that forgiveness that's a process.

This, you think, is why Riku sleeps on your floor most nights instead of in your bed. He says it'd be too cramped, and he's right – neither of you are knobby-kneed 13-year-olds anymore, after all, and furniture shopping wasn't exactly your first homecoming errand – but Riku is all about the principle of the thing. You huff and wish you could just pull him up into your bed anyway; instead, you do your best to remember that while he won't let himself sleep next to you, at least he isn't making himself stay home alone.

It's a process.

You reach down to hold his hand while you drift off to sleep, and he lets you.

–

“Where do the nightmares start, for you?” you ask one night.

It's been a rough week. Not all weeks are rough, and fewer still as time goes on, but right now the bruises under his eyes look like blood-coral in the setting sun and you're pretty sure you don't look so great yourself.

Presently, he blinks up at you from his new blanket-nest on your floor and laughs that quiet, late-night laugh. Something warm and pastel powders over your ribcage. “What do you mean?”

“The nightmares,” you explain. You point to your bottom left rib. “Mine start here, right when I'm falling asleep.”

He hums, thinks on it for a moment. His hand wraps around his throat like a choker. “Here,” he says, and you imagine what the voice-vibrations must feel like skittering up his palm. “But it's not always before I fall asleep. Sometimes it lasts all day.”

His eyes go distant for a minute, and you imagine what he might be thinking about: the island drowning in ink, the giants with hands for mouths, the witch-whisper of _the world is yours, all you have to do is burn._ You bring his hand up to your mouth – his palm still half-mooned by a little sliver of dark, from the shingle – and kiss it.

And then he leans up to kiss your mouth, and you forget about any hands that aren't your own.

–

There are nights when he won't come over.

These are the nights that you think Riku is trying to be Atlas – letting the sky grind his spine into dust like it'll crush him otherwise, like it's the only way to atone for whatever sins are still inscribed on his back. It's a burden he has to shoulder alone, or the weight will never really go away. It doesn't mean you have to like it.

There are moments when he looks so far away that it scares you, because Riku has been floating in the aether of Away for so long that you catch yourself thinking you may never really pin him down, even when you're shoulder-to-shoulder and you can feel the warmth radiating off him – but then he laughs, or smiles, or makes fun of you and Kairi, and you think, _No_. Riku is still Riku, is always Riku no matter what face he takes, and Riku is someone who always comes back to you. You trace constellations into his back and tell him to sleep easy. He keeps pressing his palms to the sky.

–

“Am I supposed to be afraid to get better?” Riku asks you one night, and there it is: the flash of sea-quartz, the strike of the clock. All life and no escape.

You fold your arms behind your head, peering up at the ceiling. It's an important question. “What do you mean?”

“Now that it's all over,” he says. “It's... getting easier, but what if it shouldn't be? After all that stuff I did – after everything that happened, who says I even deserve--”

Something in you startles, dizzying and merlot red, because that's-- that's too fundamentally wrong to even consider as _maybe_ -true. Like banging a hand down on a piano and calling it music; like leaving the island and calling it home. It's just not _right_ – not now, not when he's given up so much. Not when he's tried so hard.

You're pulling him into your arms before you've even registered that you're on the floor, knees banging on the floor as you scramble out of bed. “You came home,” you say, and it feels like knocking back cough syrup, thick and sticky on your throat. You bury yourself in him; he's a stiff thing in your arms, at first, but he shudders a sigh and falls backwards with you. _Loosen the noose._ “You came home.”

–

Riku falls into your bed and sleeps easy.

**Author's Note:**

> Secret Santa gift for nebulousnoiz on Tumblr!!
> 
> Speaking of which, catch me at traversetown.tumblr.com doing absolutely nothing all the time.


End file.
